This assessment of the threatened status of the Class Mammalia was made possible not only by funding, but by a network of partnerships between institutions and individuals. A huge debt is owed to a number of staff in the IUCN Species Programme who supported the project over the last five years. We particularly thank Jane Smart, Dena Cator, Julie Griffin, Bryan Hugill, Lynette Lew, Hugo Ruiz Lozano, Claire Santer, and Doreen Zivkovic for both administrative and technical support. Thanks are also due to Susannah O'Hanlon and Leah Collett, as well as IUCN volunteers Philip Martin and James Beresford, who provided much-needed GIS support in the final stages of the project.

At CI, we thank the following people for providing regional and local logistic support for workshops and for coordination of species assessments and species experts: Jim Barborak, Daniel Brito, Don Church, Jaime García-Moreno, Claude Gascon, Roger James, Jill Lucena, Ella Outlaw, Conrad Savy, Will Turner, Laara Manler, Carlos Manuel-Rodriguez, and Mohamed Bakarr.

For several years, the GMA was housed at UVA through a Memorandum of Understanding signed between CI and then Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies at UVA, Ariel Gomez. We are grateful to Ariel Gomez for his hospitality during the time that the project was based there. At UVA Hank Shugart helped provide day-to-day oversight, and Cindy Allen, Sarah Alspaugh, Michael Erwin, Lyndon Estes, Lelia Gibson, Jann Goetzman, James Green, Pam Hoover, Mike Knetzger, Grace Lipscomb, Steve Macko, Carleton Ray, Robert Swap, Sam Truslow, Henry White, Jack Wisman, Charlotta Wriston, and Joseph Ziemen provided intellectual input and technical support. A special word of thanks is due to Jennifer Law and Tamar Samuel Siegel for their assistance in keeping the project running, and to Will Tomanek and Robert Washington-Allen, who helped in problem solving and computer applications.

The taxonomic foundation of this project, as mentioned elsewhere, owes much to the efforts of the editors and authors of the 3rd edition of Mammal Species of the World (MSW). We are most grateful to Don Wilson, DeeAnn Reeder, Nancy Simmons, Robert Hoffmann, Guy Musser, Michael Carleton, Sydney Anderson, Richard Thorington, Jr., Robert Voss and all of the other authors for providing advance drafts of their manuscripts and species lists that proved so useful at the beginning stages of the project (2003 to 2004). We also take this opportunity to pay tribute to the late Jeheskel (Hezy) Shoshani, Peter Grubb and W. Chris Wozencraft, all MSW authors and active members of IUCN/SSC Specialist Groups sadly no longer with us. We thank Sam Turvey for making unpublished data available at critical periods particularly based on his work on Holocene mammal extinctions and for support of the assessment process at workshops and elsewhere.

IEA and the Department of Human and Animal Biology at Sapienza Università di Roma formed the Southeast Asia Mammal Databank (SAMD) project, which partnered with this project to share data and funding. The partnership was supported by The ASEAN Center for Biodiversity, Institute of Biology of the University of the Philippines - Diliman, Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI), and the Vietnamese Institute of Ecology and Biological Resources.

We thank Robert Pressey for numerous stimulating discussions at various phases of the project. We would especially like to recognize John Gittleman for his leadership in aquiring the necessary funds and students to develop early version of the maps, and Kate Jones for coordinating the production of numerous maps for bats. We also recognize Ken Aplin, Kaycie Billmark, Olaf Bininda-Emonds, Chris Carbone, Marcel Cardillo, Justin O'Dell, Eric Dinerstein, Richard Estes, Darrin Lunde, Charlie Nunn, John Morrison, John Pilgrim, Samantha Price, Andy Purvis, and Ronald Strahan for their technical inputs and guidance.

In addition to the workshops, maps and information provided by the Chinese Species Information Service were instrumental in constructing accounts of many, if not most, of the Chinese mammals.

The concept of this project, formerly referred to as the Global Mammal Assessment (GMA), and the partnerships that resulted, arose from a working group and workshop hosted by the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (University of California, Santa Barbara) entitled "Towards a Global Database of Terrestrial Vertebrate Distributions, Mammals Subgroup", February 4-7, 2002.